Bloomsbury Colleges Studentship: Interoception in Early Childhood: Measurement, Mechanisms and Consequences

Background and rationale

Interoceptive accuracy - the ability to perceive internal bodily signals - has been linked to fundamental aspects of socio-emotional development that emerge early in childhood and are disrupted across a range of clinical conditions, and predict functional outcomes. In adults, interoceptive accuracy has been particularly implicated in anxiety disorders, where atypical processing of bodily sensations forms part of the diagnostic criteria. However, empirical demonstrations of the link between interoception and anxiety are limited, and results are mixed. To better understand the directionality of this link, we need to study interoception early in development when anxiety symptoms begin to emerge. We also need to delineate which aspects of socio-emotional development (e.g., emotion regulation) may link interoception both to poor mental health but also real-life difficulties (e.g., educational engagement) in this critical period early in life. There have been some investigations of interoception in infancy and early childhood using eye-tracking or behavioural tasks (Addabbo and Milani, 2025), but existing methodologies have significant limitations.

One of the most common methods to measure interoceptive accuracy (with some examples in child populations) is by assessing an individual’s ability to detect their heartbeats, indexed by counting or tapping along to heartbeats, or selecting an auditory stimulus that is synchronous with experienced heartbeats. However, these types of tasks have been criticised as they do not account for individual differences in numerical ability, working memory, or attentional differences such as mind-wandering, all of which could explain low performance. These issues are particularly relevant to young children. Furthermore, in the adult literature, the counting methodology has been criticised as one could pass a task simply by knowing one’s own average heartrate without perceiving any heartbeats. Existing eye-tracking methodologies have been criticised for assumptions made about the degree of individual differences in the delay between the heart beating and an individual feeling a heartbeat. These significant limitations mean it is hard to draw any strong conclusions from the existing body of work on interoceptive accuracy in young children.

What is required is a new set of tasks capturing interoceptive accuracy, that sufficiently control for potential confounders and are suitable for use with young children. From this, we can then begin to test the directionality of links between interoceptive accuracy and key aspects of socio-emotional development, along with the role of impaired interoceptive accuracy in driving emerging anxiety symptoms. This project will focus on the period when children are in primary education, as many of these socio-emotional abilities (e.g., emotion regulation), along with mental well-being, are key to understanding how children fare in school environments. Results of this line of work will inform how to better target interventions to support positive mental health and educational engagement in young children.

Aims and Objectives

This PhD studentship will significantly advance our understanding of interoceptive development in primary-school age children. By developing a new experimental task suitable for younger populations, it will allow interrogation of key hypotheses regarding the potentially causal role of impaired interoceptive accuracy in the emergence of mental health problems and educational engagement, and explaining individual variability in socio-emotional abilities, during a critical period of child development.

Methods and Timescale

Year 1: Develop new tasks for assessing interoceptive accuracy in young children (6-8 years), using eye-tracking and wireless electrocardiogram (ECG) technology. This will involve asking children to tap when they feel their heartbeat and comparing the consistency of the delay between their measured (using ECG recording) and reported heartbeats. Eye-tracking tasks will adapt infant preferential looking paradigms, which display stimuli that are synchronous or asynchronous with the participants heartbeat and capture gaze response to both, to be suitable for older children. Previous work has found children of a similar age are able to tap along to a set beat (Tierney et al., 2021, JECP), which we will include as a control condition. We anticipate these tasks taking ~45 minutes per child to collect.

Year 2: Using these new tasks, in addition to existing eye-tracking paradigms that have been previously used to track interoception in infants (providing a contingency plan if novel tasks do not work as planned), collect information about the average level of interoceptive accuracy in children aged 6-8 years, and test whether individual differences in interoceptive accuracy are associated with key cognitive and emotional processes (e.g., emotion recognition, emotion regulation), emerging anxiety symptoms, functional outcomes including educational engagement and parental interoceptive accuracy. A sample size of 60 children is required to detect hypothesised effects (d=0.35) at 80% power, with n=30 completing the novel interoception tasks 2 weeks later to assess test re-test reliability.

Year 3: The original sample will be followed up 6 months later and asked to report (via online questionnaire) on their child’s anxiety symptoms, socio-emotional development and educational engagement. This will allow testing of whether interoceptive accuracy predicts change over time in child outcomes.

Ethics

Taking part in the proposed assessments will pose no significant risk to children beyond what they encounter in their daily lives. All equipment used in the project is child-friendly and has undergone extensive risk assessments. In Year 1 of the project, the PS (who has extensive experience collecting eye-tracking, neuroimaging and physiological data from young children) will support the candidate to submit an application to the Birkbeck ethics committee.

Significance

This project will produce experimental tools required to advance the study of interoception early in development. This will be foundational for other researchers seeking to understand how interoception unfolds, and the developmental consequences for children who have impairments in this fundamental process. Moreover, this project will provide the first test of whether interoceptive accuracy predicts change in socio-emotional development, anxiety symptoms and educational engagement over time, which be the first key step in understanding the causal role of interoceptive accuracy in cognition, mental health and functional outcomes. Better understanding of the development of interoceptive accuracy and it’s correlates early in life will advance theoretical models of child development, and pave the way for novel targeted interventions to support child mental health and development.

Outcomes and Dissemination

Peer-reviewed manuscripts, with the student as first author, will be submitted to high-impact journals such as Developmental Science. Findings will also be presented at national and international conferences such as Society for Child Development Scientific annual meetings. The PhD student will be encouraged to consider wider forms of dissemination and capitalise on the wealth of existing networks at the CBCD with local nurseries and schools, and relevant charities and organisations. The final task files will be made freely available to other researchers.

The project is funded for 3 years and the scholarship will cover tuition fees at the UKRI stipend rate (£22,780 per year for 2025-26) and the home fee rate (£5,006 in 2025-26).

Principal Supervisor: Dr Virginia Carter Leno, Birkbeck, University of London.

Co-Supervisor: Professor Geoff Bird, UCL Institute of Education (IOE).

Co-Supervisor: Professor Denis Mareschal, Birkbeck, University of London.

• Bird, G., & Viding, E. (2014). The self to other model of empathy: Providing a new framework for understanding empathy impairments in psychopathy, autism, and alexithymia. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 47, 520-532.
• Brewer, R., Murphy, J., & Bird, G. (2021). Atypical interoception as a common risk factor for psychopathology: A review. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 130, 470-508.
• Addabbo, M., & Milani, L. (2025). Measuring interoception from infancy to childhood: A scoping review.
• Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 173, 106161.
• Milosavljevic B., Carter Leno, V., Simonoff, E., Baird, G., Pickles, A., Jones, C., Erskine, C., Charman, T., Happé, F. (2015). Alexithymia in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Its Relationship to Internalising Difficulties, Sensory Modulation and Social Cognition. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 46(4), 1354–1367.

Applicants should complete the online application form for the full-time PhD Psychology programme and clearly indicate their desire to be considered for this Bloomsbury Colleges PhD Studentship opportunity.

Wednesday 4 March 2026.